High schoolers getting taste of supercomputer

• By SONIA SMITH
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jun 16, 2009 - Page: 1B

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Luke O’Quinn sat transfixed in front of his glowing computer screen Monday afternoon, typing in short lines of code and listening to the instructor’s directions.

The 14-year-old LSU Lab School student was one of 24 local high schoolers who chose to spend the week getting a crash course in supercomputing at the Beowulf Boot Camp at LSU’s Center for Computation and Technology.

Though O’Quinn and many of his fellow campers had little or no exposure to programming or supercomputers, by the end of the week they will have learned the basics of Python, a programming language, and have built a small supercomputing cluster.

Quinn said he was excited by the exposure the program offered him to the field of computer science.

“I think it’s really great,” he said of the camp. “The people are patient and willing to help.”

Thomas Sterling, an LSU computer science professor best known for developing the Beowulf supercomputing cluster while at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said that camp attempts supercomputing on a small scale to demonstrate its potential applications.

After a round of lectures Monday morning, students were given a computer’s component parts and told how to assemble them.

Sterling said he hopes the camp will work as a recruitment tool.

The camp fostered an interest in supercomputing in Phillip LeBlanc, 19, when he attended the camp’s inaugural run in 2007.

LeBlanc is now a sophomore at LSU, majoring in computer science and serving as an instructor at the camp.

Rivers Berryhill, a senior at St. Joseph’s Academy, came to the camp with plenty of experience with the hardware side of computing — she works at the computer help desk at her school — but said she had never learned a programming language before she started learning Python on Monday.

“This camp is new to me but I love it already,” she said.

Berryhill said she is mulling a double major in journalism and computer science once she gets to college.